


we're the asteroid that's overdue (I worship you)

by Shadowcrawler



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cults, Alternate Universe - The Magnus Archives Fusion, Arson, Blasphemy, F/F, Fire, Murder, Obsession, Self-Immolation, Semi-Public Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28281504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowcrawler/pseuds/Shadowcrawler
Summary: Elektra Natchios had always wondered about her purpose in life. That stopped as soon as she set eyes on Karen Page.
Relationships: Elektra Natchios/Karen Page
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	we're the asteroid that's overdue (I worship you)

**Author's Note:**

> **Trigger warnings for: being indoctrinated into a cult, self-harm by way of self-immolation, obsessive religious thoughts, murder by stabbing and immolation, burning a corpse, and lots of descriptions of fire, burning, and arson.** If any of this bothers you, please turn back now. This isn't my usual happy fluff, this is some pretty dark and fucked up shit. (I mean, still romantic, I'm still ME for god's sake, but if you read my Elektra/Alexandra fic, it's more like that than the standard stuff I write.)
> 
> Fills the "stygiophilia" square of my MCU Femslash Bingo Card, sort of. Stygiophilia is defined as "arousal to the thought of hellfire and damnation." I continue to only loosely follow the prompts, lol. (See, I am still working on the bingo card, just slower than I'd hoped.)
> 
> This is an AU placing these characters in the world of the Magnus Archives, which is, in short, a horror fiction podcast in which common fears such as the Dark, the Buried (small spaces, being buried or trapped, etc.), the End (death), etc. are sentient entities that infiltrated the human world to feed on the fear they generate. This story centers on the Desolation, which is the fear of pain, loss, fire/burning, and devastation, especially senseless destruction. I made Karen the messiah figure of the Cult of the Lightless Flame, and Elektra her chief acolyte. Credit to Jonathan Sims for Agnes Montague's backstory, which I borrowed for Karen. (I WILL do an MCU crossover with every single thing I've ever liked, you just watch me.)

Elektra Natchios had always wondered about her purpose in life. That stopped as soon as she set eyes on Karen Page.

Her parents had insisted all her life that she had “so much potential” and, because her father hoped she would follow in his footsteps either in his business or as an ambassador, they spared no expense in her upbringing. She had gotten a top-tier education and been trained in a variety of skills and hobbies, all to make her the perfect successor. And she had played her part perfectly. She elected to work with her father, and she oversaw important projects with clients from all around the world, and she felt almost nothing about any of it.

Until, that is, she stopped for an Tuesday afternoon coffee in a local shop and met a beautiful woman who smelled of matches and incense. 

Karen Page was tall and strawberry blonde, with striking blue eyes it was impossible to look away from. That day, she was shy and soft-spoken, sitting across from Elektra in the booth that Elektra had slipped into as if magnetized. Karen had a cup in front of her as well, but she did not drink it, and it sat there, the steam rising elegantly out of it, as they talked for hours. Elektra’s own coffee was hot too, hot enough to scald the roof of her mouth. She imagined the heat came from Karen’s lips on hers instead, and the wanting made her shiver.

They talked about destiny - about how it felt to be told from birth that you were meant to be someone special, someone who had been chosen for greatness. How isolating it was, and how draining, and how no one was interested in who you really  _ were _ , only in what you were supposed to  _ be _ . 

By the time Karen excused herself with an apologetic smile, Elektra felt as if every nerve in her body was on fire.

She went back every day at the same time, hoping to see Karen again. Exactly one week after they first met, Karen was there, at 3 PM. She looked at Elektra with a strange light in her eyes and gestured for her to sit down. This time she said, “I have some people I’d like you to meet.”

Elektra had a meeting with her father and his advisors that afternoon. She turned off her phone and stood up to follow Karen out of the shop. 

Outside, they walked together for a while, until they reached a nearby park. A group of people, a dozen or so, were standing there, watching them. Nothing about them was remarkable at all, except that Elektra could see a vicious hunger in their eyes that she recognized as being very much like her own. 

As she and Karen walked up to the group, an older white woman with an angular face stepped forward to meet them. To meet Elektra, really. She got very close, made a disapproving noise, and gave Elektra a searching look for a moment before shaking her head. “Not this one,” she said, and her breath felt scorching on Elektra’s face. Elektra instinctively reached for her face to push the woman away - and her hand sunk into the woman’s cheek like she was made of softened candle wax.

The pain was exquisitely horrible, and Elektra must have screamed, though if she did no one did anything. She stared in fascinated horror as the molten flesh flowed down her arm and toward the ground. Finally she came to her senses enough to pull her hand out of the woman’s head, and the woman laughed in a mocking sort of way and reached up to reshape her cheek. “Well,” she said, looking at Karen, “I’ve been wrong before. If you really think this one is right.”

“She is,” said Karen, and Elektra realized that Karen had been talking the entire time, and somehow she had been listening. Karen had been giving her instructions. She knew what she had to do if she wanted to stay with her.

She chose her first victim carefully. One of her father’s most promising salesmen, John Raymond. He’d recently been instrumental in her father’s deal with the energy branch of the Roxxon Corporation. His wife was expecting their first child, which Elektra knew because she’d been forced to attend the insipid baby shower with her mother, and the family had just recently bought an enormous new house. Raymond was an overeager kissass, always trying to talk to Elektra like he thought they might be friends. He wasn’t as bad as the older ones, who leered at her, or the ones who still treated her like a child. But he was the one who walked about with a stupid smile on his face most days. It was the fact that he had so much to  _ live for _ that made him the perfect choice.

She invited him out for a business dinner, until the guise of getting to know her father’s underlings better. She drugged his drink with just enough to make him stupid and pliable, coaxed him into an abandoned alley, and used the twin sai her father had given her for her twenty first birthday to slit his throat. 

She had a single moment of uncertainty as she stared down at his body. How would she get rid of the body? Perhaps this was too sloppy; perhaps it wouldn’t be enough for Karen.

Then, before her eyes, smoke began to rise from the edges of Raymond’s body. In an instant his body was engulfed in flames, and the sharp, oily scent of cooking flesh mixed with the scent of the fire overwhelmed Elektra. She felt something awaken within her, and the fire she’d felt when talking to Karen lit up every part of herself again. She had never been a religious person, but she felt an all-encompassing love envelop her that she knew in her soul was the purpose she had been searching for. This fire, this  _ god _ , was concerned only with destruction, with pain and desolation, and Elektra embraced it. She wept with the joy of it, her tears turning instantly to steam.

Enough of Raymond’s body was left for the police to identify it, of course. What would be the point in an anonymous victim? And why give his new widow any glimmer of hope that he had simply left her and might be found again? The point wasn’t merely to kill him, Elektra understood - it was to  _ destroy _ him, to snuff out the hope for the future that he and his loved ones had held. 

Elektra was forced to attend the funeral, of course, and could barely keep from smiling the entire time as she watched Raymond’s wife struggle to get out a single word amidst the sobs. The next day she fabricated evidence that he had been involved in a would-be coup to oust her father, and the day after that she set fire to his house. With each act of desolation, she felt the love of her new god surging through her.

She craved more, always more. She blew off social engagements and business meetings to meet with Karen and her group. She learned that they called their god the Lightless Flame. It was good to have a name for the ever-hungry heat that scalded her from within, but it was better when after one meeting Karen took her aside. “How’s your hand?” she asked.

After several weeks, Elektra barely thought of the terrible pain that had engulfed her hand that day. “It’s fine,” she said, holding it up to demonstrate. Then, on impulse, she reached out to touch Karen’s cheek.

But before she could, Karen flinched back as if Elektra had slapped her. “You can’t touch me like this,” she said. “Not while you’re still…” She didn’t say  _ human _ but Elektra understood it. 

“Then I won’t be anymore,” Elektra said, with more certainty than she’d ever had.

She didn’t hear any voices telling her what to do next, not even Karen’s. The knowledge simply came to her.

Her father had spent her life reminding her that the Natchios name must be feared and respected. She was not to do anything to damage their reputation. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be avoided, as there was simply no respectable way to self-immolate. So she made a spectacle of herself instead.

She chose the park where she had first encountered the group. None of the onlookers realized what was happening until she was already burning, laughing and dancing as she did. A few of them screamed. A few stood frozen in horror, watching the flames consume her. One foolish man attempted to tackle her, presumably to put out the fire; overcome with a sudden strength, she pushed him away, and then he was ablaze as well. She took advantage of the distraction to slip away, reveling in the destruction of her humanity.

Finally, she emerged from her chrysalis of flame, and went to Karen’s home. She only had to knock once, and then Karen was standing there, smiling at her. “You did it,” she said. Elektra opened her mouth, found there were no words for what truly she wanted to say, and leaned forward to capture Karen’s lips with her own instead.

Later, when they lay in bed twined together, Karen told Elektra of the destiny she’d been born into. She was to usher in a new world, a world where the Lightless Flame would feast on the endless terror and destruction that it wrought. The Scoured Earth, she called it. She had been born in flames, her mother a willing sacrifice to ensure that their messiah would be brought forth. Beneath her skin blazed a power great enough to bring forth a god. None of them were entirely human anymore, but Karen had perhaps  _ never _ been human.

Elektra heard all this, and understood it, and it changed nothing for her. 

From that point on, her devotion to the Lightless Flame, and to Karen, only increased. It gave her purpose. The longer she stayed with them, the more her former life felt like a hazy dream. It became second nature to her to look at a person and see exactly what they had to lose. Sometimes it was nothing at all. Sometimes it was a promising career, a blossoming family, or simply the unrelenting spark of hope that made some people refuse to surrender to despair. 

Those ones, the ones who tried to hold on despite it all, were the ones she loved playing with most. She relished seeing the despair in their eyes when their last hopes were desolated. 

Happiness meant something different to Elektra now. She felt it when witnessing the despair of the local independent bookstore’s owner, watching helplessly as her livelihood burned to the ground. She felt it when she exposed a local pastor, thought of by many in the community as a paragon of virtue, who had a secret second family a few towns over. He fled in shame, leaving both families and his congregation devastated. And she felt it most of all when she was with Karen. 

When they kissed, Elektra felt as if she were ablaze again. She had had human lovers before, but none of those memories compared to the way it felt when Karen touched her. Karen’s touch was scalding heat, and Elektra’s new body yielded to it. 

She could see the stares of her fellow believers, hear their whispers when she stood close to Karen or clasped hands with her for a moment. It unsettled them. Karen was no mere woman, to be touched like this, casually and tenderly. She was to be revered, yes, but as their savior, the one chosen to lead them into a new paradise of desolation. But Elektra - she loved Karen as a woman as well as a savior. The others couldn’t understand that. She couldn’t explain it to them.

She hadn’t been allowed to be reckless before. But with Karen, and with the power of the Lightless Flame within her, she felt invincible. A few months after her transformation, she noticed a nearby church undergoing renovations, and kept her eye on it. The work took months, and was slow, but she noticed that many of the construction crew were wearing shirts with the church’s logo on it. She watched how they laughed with each other as they worked. She watched people file out of the temporary doors every Sunday, beaming with pride as they looked at the new wing being added on. She heard one of them talking with his wife excitedly about how helpful the new kitchen would be for the weekly community dinners. Their website proudly announced the plans for private and family sleeping quarters, for anyone in need. 

She waited until the work was almost completed, and then she convinced Karen to come help her burn the church down.

They could have started the fire outside the building, but Elektra was a romantic. She brought Karen inside the chapel, and then she lit a kerosene-soaked rag and tossed it onto the crucifix. They kissed as the flames began to spread. The sharp tang of smoke filled Elektra’s senses as she held Karen close and slipped two fingers inside her. 

Karen’s moans as Elektra fucked her (fast and brutal, the way they both liked it) almost drowned out the sounds of the fire raging around them. Someone, perhaps a late night visitor or a groundskeeper, ran into the chapel and froze for a second, his eyes huge. Elektra caught his eye and smirked at him, reveling in both his horror and dismay at the destruction of the church around them and his shock at watching what he considered a blasphemous act. 

As Karen came around Elektra’s fingers with a final shriek, the man seemed to snap out of his reverie of terror and ran out of the chapel, shouting into his phone. The fire was roaring around them now, not harming them, of course, but consuming everything else in its path. Post-orgasm, Karen had nestled so close to Elektra that it almost felt as if they were one being.

But, much as Elektra loved the feeling of having Karen melted against her, they couldn’t risk being discovered by anyone else. She kissed Karen’s forehead to rouse her, and Karen opened her eyes and smiled. Elektra took her hand and they walked out of the inferno together. Perhaps, to the handful of onlookers that had gathered in the parking lot, it looked as if they were walking out of hell together. But Elektra knew better - they were, together, coming ever closer to creating the world that would be their heaven.


End file.
